Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Complete Guide 2024

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of improving the performance of your website to turn more visitors into leads and customers. We prepared a complete guide about CRO for beginners, which will assist you in learning the fundamentals of conversion, conversion rate, and CRO strategies on your website.

Along with CRO experts to follow for ongoing learning, we'll discuss tools and metrics to help you track your progress. You can find a summarized version of conversion rate optimization tips in 99 steps and some other helpful information on the infographic below.

Or go through the table of content part of the guide to get more detailed knowledge on the various subjects of CRO!

To drive your insights and boost conversion rates, explore this article and apply these to your business for CRO!

Enjoy!

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the ongoing process of using analytics and acknowledging customer feedback to increase the percentage of users who perform a desired action on your website.

Desired actions include completing a purchase, clicking ‘add to cart,’ signing up to an email list, or clicking a link. CRO focuses on improving the user experience on the site for these desired actions.

Furthermore, CRO is not a magical fix; it is just a formula to improve your website. Even if your website is conversion rate optimized, you still need to provide differentiated value to attract loyal customers.

If you’re seeking a reliable website builder for small businesses, consider diving into our insightful post.

99 Proven Tips to Increase eCommerce CR Infographic

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What is Conversion?

Conversion is attaining an aim: a user completes one of your site's goals.

There are two types of conversion: micro conversion and macro conversion.

Micro conversions usually lead to macro conversions because a lead becomes a customer as they know your company's culture, your brand, and your products well.

Micro-conversion

A micro conversion means a potential customer has engaged with your brand.

Examples of micro-conversions:

• Subscribing to your email list
• Signing up for an account
• Following your social media accounts
• Adding a product or service to the shopping cart

Macro-conversion

A macro conversion occurs when a visitor engages in a primary offer on your website. A macro conversion is also known as the primary goal of a company.

Examples of macro-conversions:

• Buying a product from your website
• Requesting a quote
• Making a reservation
• Downloading your application
• Registering to a primary service

What is Conversion Rate?

The conversion rate is the number of times the desired goal is achieved divided by the number of users creating site traffic. For instance, if your conversion goal is to sell a product, you can calculate the rate as the number of sold goods in each visit divided by the number of different times a user occupied your site.

Every visit and every unique customer counts as one conversion. Whether the visitor purchased three things or left the website without converting does not matter. For example, if a customer buys two shirts online, it still counts as a single conversion.

Conversion rate differs from conversion optimization and paid ads statistics because it focuses on which of your keywords are traffic-driving, how many clicks you get through organic search, and how many users come to your website organically.

How to Calculate Conversion Rate?

(Total Attributed Conversions / Total Measured Clicks) * 100

To textualize the formula, think of like this: if your conversion rate is 30%, 30 out of 100 people visiting your website convert.

Benefits of Conversion
Rate Optimization

It does not matter whether your current organizational goal is to increase the readability, the amount of times a visitor reads one of your blog posts, and the number of backlinks to your site or to boost your sales, and the number of customers registering.

There are plenty of reasons for you to have conversion rate optimization:

• Because quality is more important than quantity in acquiring customers, finding the right customer for your business helps you to achieve your goals. CRO offers you the ability to understand customer insights and their language.
• It is cost-effective because you will pay for traffic to your website, and a high rate of conversion means a better return on investment.
• Turning passive browsers into leads, since it figures out which users are looking for what experience on your site or what is stopping them from taking the desired action.
• By figuring out how to get a higher conversion rate, you will have most of your acquisition efforts high ROI without incorporating new customers into play.
• CRO enables growth without running out of resources and with an increased number of customers because it can turn visitors into potential customers.
• You will have happy customers due to their pleasant user experience on your website; hence, CRO studies what works on your website and how to expand on it.
• It provides a defense against the limited patience of users because, with CRO, you can provide what users want and expect from your website.
• An increase in conversion rate by CRO leads to a decrease in customer acquisition cost (CAC) – the cost of obtaining a new customer.
• What is CAC?
• The better your conversion rate is, the more traffic your website gets; the more visitors you have, the more engagement you receive; the more desired action you gain, the more your profit will be.
• Users will choose you if you can deliver a visible service quicker and better than your competitors.

Webpages and Webpage Elements Affecting CRO

Homepage

The homepage of your website makes the first impression on browsers and allows you to guide those visitors further into your website.

To increase user experience and lead to conversions, you can;

• Emphasize links to the products page,
• Present a free sign-up button,
• Include a chatbox,
• Show your top-selling products,
• Offer more ways to order a product
• Show video content,
• Have the support and contact page.

In other ways, ornament your webpage effectively so that the visitor is willing to see other pages on your website and take the desired action.

Product Search Page

The product search page lets visitor decide whether to purchase your product or keep browsing. Therefore, showing your customers why they should purchase would increase your conversions. You can;

• Test your search options for accuracy,
• Create an intelligent search covering singular, plural, misspelled words,
• Implement auto-suggestions to help a user find other relevant keywords,
• Present video content for your best-selling products and your successes,
• Show social proof and testimonials to prove your reliability.

Product Page

Dynamic product pages can show your visitors the appearance of a product and present its differentiated value from your competitors.

To have a converting product page, you can;

• Implement auto-suggestions to help a user find the related products,
• Generate detailed, benefit-focused content about your products,
• Use more than one high-quality image for every product on your page,
• Offer free shipping,
• Show each product’s delivery time clearly, and give a chance to select delivery date,
• Enable out-of-stock notifications,
• Encourage users to leave insights about your brand,
• Sort category structure by popularity and additional filtering options such as price, hiding out-of-stock products, color, and size.

Pricing Page

The pricing page of a website is usually the make or break point for many visitors, so applying CRO with clear descriptions of products and some testimonial comments would be beneficial in the boosting conversion rate. Also, you can;

• Modify pricing intervals such as price per year,
• Highlight the benefits of making a purchase,
• Make your CTAs visible and well-designed,
• Enable comparison between options easily,
• Offer a free trial for your service initially,
• Support the purchase activity with live chat,
• A/B test your pricing page.

Checkout Page

The checkout page is where people mostly leave without any conversion.

To optimize your checkout page for maximized conversion rates, pay attention to these;

• Offer a persistent shopping cart,
• Don’t ask for the same information twice,
• Demand for validation of personal data,
• Mark the questions as mandatory or optional clearly,
• Present input examples to each field,
• Have an auto-fill feature when a user enters a zip code,
• Generate linear formed questions lists,
• Be specific in your calls to action,
• Ask for following social media accounts,
• Don’t complicate password selection,
• Give brave and irresistible guarantees,
• Have a link or call-to-action clearly showing your refund & shipping policy.

Blog Page

If the contents on your blog page can use CRO wisely, you may convert your readers into leads. For example, applying CRO in blog webpages is often experienced with an attractive call-to-action of an e-book or industry report inviting readers to learn more about the subject.

Then, the user would give their personal information like email address, telephone number, and age in exchange for this valuable offer.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are designed for browsers to take the desired action of the related webpage. You can optimize your website with relevant videos, free resources, and attractive images to encourage users to engage with the brand.

Note that a study by Word Stream about conversion rate showed that using long-form landing pages increases conversions by 220 percent.

However, a short form only asking for necessary data would be perceived as more doable by the user.

Call to Action

A call to action (CTA) is a button asking the user to take action leading to a conversion. For instance, the "Sign Up Now" button in a popup, the "Buy Now" button in Amazon.com, and the "Download Now" button in an e-book distribution page are examples of different calls to action.

Your call to action needs to be clear, well-placed, and attention-grabbing to increase the conversion rate.

Graphics

Presenting graphs on a website is a very efficient way of building trust and increasing credibility in visitors' eyes. Therefore, using data reflecting your achievements is a good idea to reflect your brand success on your website.

Your graphics on pages must be relevant, easy to find, clean, unique, and very understandable to enhance conversion rates.

Page Speed

You must be able to retain a visitor who just arrived on your website to succeed in increasing your conversion rate. Since 40% of your visitors leave from a page if the web page's load speed exceeds 3 seconds, you need to build a better mousetrap via your page speed .

Search Engine Optimization

SEO operations augment your visibility on search engines. If SEO efforts are accurately expended, people looking for something that your website offers will find the desired page easily.

On the other hand, if SEO operations are not managed well, people looking for something that you do not offer on your website may come and leave immediately, which leads to lower the conversion rate.

To offer a better user experience on your website corresponding with SEO, keep these in mind;

• Titles on your website must be accurate, clear, and informative, reflecting the subject in your content.
• Images must be downloaded to the website with correct names and keywords.
• Your content's meta title and meta description should be proper and include relevant keywords.
• Content of your webpages must be current, attractive, worth reading, informative, and straightforward.

Usability

The usability of a website is determined by some key features of your website.

To have a high conversion rate, you need to keep these characteristics as favorable as possible:

• The number of key activities for users to satisfy the desired action should be less.
• Amount of pages a customer faces in the purchase process needs to be low.
• The payment process for a product must be easy to complete.
• The contact information of your company should be visible.
• Registration or sign up for an account needs to be easy.

Mobile Responsiveness

Mobile responsive webpages are fundamental in conversion rate optimization because you don’t want to miss the chance to convert mobile browsers into customers, generating 63% of all US online traffic.

Furthermore, all your webpages should have Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) integration to get a high conversion rate.

AMP is an open standard for any website to load pages quickly on mobile, designed by Google.

Customer Testimonials

People are more inclined to make purchases from brands that could satisfy their previous customers with a service or a product than brands with no testimonials. Social proof is a powerful conversion rate driver.

Therefore, you can present opinions and comments of customers on your website to raise your conversions.

22 TIPS for Successful Conversion Rate Optimization

1. Gather Necessary Human Resources

Conversion rate optimization is a continuous and cross-functional process, so a professional team or person should manage the optimization requirements and processes.

The required knowledge, skills, and responsibilities to handle CRO operations are;

• Developing a plan for the CRO program,
• Continuously observing user behavior insights and the website’s current data,
• Designing conversion-increasing webpages,
• Creating persuasive contents that leads to taking the desired action,
• Determining variables with optimized code for A/B tests.
• Having a user-friendly live chat tool (see our recommendations for the best free live chat tools you can use)

2. Identify Your Target Customers

Before determining your digital marketing strategy for maximizing your CRO; you must ensure that your business's target market is clearly defined. Otherwise, without specifying your target audience, you won’t be able to display a perfect service.

3. Collect Data

To boost conversion rates, you need to collect information about how your visitors behave, your customers, and your CRO performance.

Data collection can be done in two ways:

• Qualitative (customer satisfaction surveys, market research, secondary data explication, etc.)
• Quantitative (bounce rate, exit rate, A/B test results, etc.)

4. Conduct Surveys on Users

Surveys are a pleasant way to know of customers regarding their wants, expectations, needs, and favors. You may boost the website conversion rate by attending to the demand after having precise information about who you will serve.

See Fun Ways to Encourage Popup Survey Participation for tips to increase the survey participation rate.

5. Create the Perfect Page

Your page content needs to be perfect – free of errors, compatible, unique, and attention-grabbing. You may use Grammarly to correct your language, and apply an A/B test to your body copy. Also, images on the page must be suitable for SEO practices – unique, colorful, and well-placed.

CTA design, content font size and color, and images on a page significantly impact conversions, so you should be very careful while designing a page to provide premium customer experience.

6. Have Calls to Action

People tend to ignore the call to action due to their common approach of banner blindness. That phenomenon leads to lack of attention toward taking the desired action of businesses. This is why your call to action should be clear, well-placed, and very attractive.

You may use the button on your landing page, blog posts, and popups to increase your website’s conversion rate.

7. Form Mobile Responsive Pages

A study by Techjury in 2023 claims that 60% of all US online traffic comes from smartphones. You do not want to miss the chance to convert mobile users into leads; therefore, you must generate mobile-responsive pages.

Moreover, if all your webpages have Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) integration, your overall conversion rate would be higher due to mobile-friendliness.

8. Present User-Friendly Webpages

A user-friendly webpage works for users because it offers excellent accessibility, visual clarity, a time-saving shopping experience, exclusive support, and so on. Specifically, websites having enormous pressure due to intense competition need to design practical, goal-oriented, and very user-friendly webpages.

9. Test Page Speed

Once a visitor clicks on a CTA and comes to your landing page, you should make them stay there. According to Google, a good load speed is 2-3 seconds. After that, 40% of your visitor gets bored of waiting for your page to load and leaves from the page. This is the reason why page speed matters a lot.

Without customers on the website, you can't maximize your conversion rates.

10. Offer Something Valuable

Offering something valuable to a visitor in exchange for obtaining their personal information or taking the desired action is the initial way to communicate directly with the target customer. Building a solid start with the user will ease the job of maximizing conversions.

See Free Giveaway Email Templates For Loyal Customers if you consider carrying out a giveaway campaign.

11. Guide Your Customer

Directional indicators like call-to-actions and navigational panels help customers to find whatever they want. Therefore, you have to be strategic about the placement of these indicators.

12. Write Compelling Headlines

Your page headline must be attention-grabbing to make the user read the following sentence. Headlines with intriguing premises and question words concentrating on the point are very effective strategies.

Moreover, you must be careful about having only one H1 in each of your webpages to stick with SEO operation rules which are very beneficial for increasing conversion rates.

13. Chat with Website Visitors

Chatting with your visitors in real time is possible using message tools. Adding message capabilities to high-performing web pages leads to an increase in conversion and better relationships with your visitors.

You can automate chat notifications action-based. For instance, someone spending more than two minutes on your product page would get an offer for help.

14. Include High Converting Popups

Conversion-ready popups are designed to grab a visitor's attention and offer a user-differentiated value. Depending on your goals, you may purchase a special popup appearance: slide box in corners, full screen, or slide bar.

Furthermore, applying customization in your popups for different segmented audiences is also a great way of encouraging clicks and turning them into customers.

15. Insert FAQ and Answers

If your visitors need help finding the exact answer to their questions and need to browse too much, they may leave the page leading to a decrease in your conversion rate

Therefore, generating an FAQ page would help you to build trust, save your customers' time, show some characteristics of your brand, and make them take the desired action.

16. Maintain Relevance Between Your Ads and Corresponding Landing Pages

You have probably experienced that clicking on a call to action to make a purchase leads to an irrelevant page. In this case, most browsers tend to leave the corresponding page and relatively decrease the website’s conversion rate.

This is why you must be very careful in call-to-action link-building on different webpages.

17. Generate Creative 404 and Not Found Pages

No matter how hard you try to ensure that your webpages are never down, it might still happen. However, you can make your website downtime a less painful experience by presenting a creative error page. This makes browsers wonder, so they tend to click on calls to action on your error page to stay on your website longer.

18. Generate Pay per Click (PPC) Ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements can be a cost-effective way to drive traffic to your website because you only pay if a browser reaches your website, creating an opportunity to convince them to convert into a customer.

19. Run Heatmap Analysis

You may run a heatmap analysis on pages that deserve special attention, like product and landing pages. The analysis results will show you where people spend most of their time on a single page, so you will understand which of your strategies attracts more attention.

20. Run Tests Regularly

You should determine the most fundamental elements affecting your conversion rate and regularly apply A/B tests to them – website design, page design, questions on a form or questionnaire, images, content, calls to action, etc.

The testing process is essential because you need to measure how your CRO efforts impact your actual conversion rate and what generates the most customers.

21. Retarget Your Visitors to Re-engage

You can re-engage with a visitor who has left your website by remarketing. (also called retargeting) – The process of tracking visitors and presenting them with online ads and banners as they browse on the web. You may initially apply this method to your high-converting pages to see how retargeting impacts conversion rate.

22. Analyze the Data

After collecting data, you should be able to interpret the results to decide on which page your focus must be to maximize your conversions, what your strengths are, which strategies are working for your business, who your target customers are, and so on.

Conversion Rate Optimization Process

Note that copying a CRO strategy that yielded effective results for your previous or your competitor’s projects does not always work.

Each CRO process simply goes through 5 phases to effectively increase the conversion rate and manage optimization campaigns:

1. Research

You should derive quantitative and qualitative data to understand what your visitors do when they land on your website – via heat map analysis, interview feedback, bounce rate, surveys, webpage analytics, and so on.

Then, you need to determine how the different elements of each page influence user behavior in terms of engagement. Obtaining such insights would enable you to eliminate unwanted features and focus on converting ones.

2. Hypothesis

Using the collected data, you can form a proposed statement explaining the particular change due to the specific effect or reason in the specific webpages. While generating your hypothesis, you may apply an A/B test to see how proposed changes affect your conversion rate.

3. Prioritization

Due to limited resources, it may not be possible for you to optimize every webpage on your site. In this case, you need to point out the potential of webpages (that are performing poorly but can be significantly improved), the importance of webpages (that are getting high traffic but have the lowest conversion rate), and the ease of making a changes in those pages.

4. Testing

A/B testing usually allows changes for CRO operations due to its simplicity. However, if you want to make multiple changes on a page, and you want to test each combination separately, then the multivariate test would be more appropriate.

5. Learning

Now, you can conclude your test results. By considering the possible outcomes (cost, human resource, customer insights) of applying (or not) the test suggestions, you will have a new perspective on optimizing website conversion rate.

An expertly planned, good-designed CRO process helps you to identify improvements and implement optimization operations to get higher conversions, and relatively more revenue.

Conversion Rate Optimization Tools

Traffic Analysis Tools

These tools allow you to monitor and examine the amount and the kind of traffic that your website has.

Additionally, you would interpret the traffic results depending on different webpages to make your website more appropriate for your target audience and to focus on the areas requiring improvement.

• Contentsquare: It aids companies in comprehending how customers utilize their websites and mobile applications. It offers insights into user behavior, such as clicks, scrolls, and form submissions.
• Google Analytics: It is a web analytics tool inside the Google Marketing Platform that measures and reports website traffic.
• Neil Patel: It is a service that analyzes a website and gives suggestions to increase website traffic.
• Free CRO Checker Tool: It examines a website and makes suggestions to enhance user experience and boost conversions.

Customer Survey Tools

Customer surveys are a perfect way of communicating with your audience about their grievances, satisfaction levels, compliments, suggestions, feedback, and comments! Having and interpreting such results coming directly from your customers creates an opportunity to improve your engagement with browsers.

• Qualaroo: It is a tool for conducting customer surveys that helps companies in learning more about the wants and needs of their clients.
• Survey Monkey: It enables companies to design and run polls, quizzes, and surveys.

Search Engine Optimization Tools

SEO tools assist you in working smarter and faster with SEO in your online marketing efforts and CRO operations.

• Keywordtool.io: It offers hundreds of keyword ideas based on the keyword you typed.
• Google Search Console: It shows website analysis, alerts, and error reports.
• Ahrefs: It makes a comprehensive link analysis and on-page analysis.
• Moz: It presents an overall view of your website, pages, and links.
• Similar Web: It generates site statistics for any domain.
• XML Sitemaps: This tool builds website maps.

Heat Map Analytic Tools

These specialized tools will provide information on how website visitors behave by tracing mouse moves, keystrokes, and clicks. If you want a complete picture of how browsers use your webpages, you will love the results obtained from Heat Map Analysis interpretations.

• Hotjar: It assists companies in understanding how visitors engage with their websites by providing visual representations of user activity, such as clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements.
• Crazyegg: It offers visualizations of user behavior, such as clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements.

Instant Messaging Tools

Instant messaging (IM) is the fastest way of communicating with your visitors in digitally. Also, providing a customized service (e.g., appealing to a user with their name) to the user would increase the chance of engagement and the conversion rate relatively.

• Olark: It enables companies to have real-time conversations with customers. It offers a chat widget that can be placed on a company's website.
• Hubspot: Businesses can use the Hubspot CRM platform or a chat widget on their website to interact with clients.
• FreeChat: Through a chat widget on their website, businesses can engage with customers using this instant messaging service.

Multivariate (MV) and A/B Testing Tools

A/B test is a method of comparing two different webpages to determine which one performs better for a specified conversion goal. Multivariate testing is very similar to A/B testing, but MV can be applied to multiple combinations. The main objective of both testing tools is to find the most efficient webpage design.

• Oracle Maxymiser: It supports companies in optimizing their websites and online interactions.
• Monetate: It offers tools for data analytics and personalization.
• Optimizely: Toolkits for MV and A/B testing are available through this website optimization platform.
• Unbounce: Solutions for MV and A/B testing are provided with Unbounce, a platform for optimizing landing pages.
• Bound360: It provides data analytics and CRM, and marketing automation system integration.

Mobile-Friendliness Test Tools

These tools provide the score of your website in terms of mobile responsiveness. Recently, Google has put a penalty on websites offering a poor experience to their mobile users and determined that mobile-friendliness of a website affects its overall ranking criteria.

• Responsive Design Checker: It allows businesses to uncover problems that can make a website challenging to use on mobile devices by simulating how a website would appear on various mobile devices.
• Google Search Console: It has a solution for testing mobile friendliness that enables companies to find any problems that can make their website challenging to use on mobile devices.

Remarketing Tools

Remarketing or retargeting tools enable websites to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time, which leads to maximizing conversion rates compared to regular ads such as social media ads or PPC ads.

• Adroll: Companies can reach clients who have interacted with their brand thanks to Adroll.
• SharpSpring Ads: Businesses can make targeted advertising and show it to users who have been to their website or interacted with their brand.

The Best Popup Builder

Popups are an effective way to reach your target audience and interact with your visitors. If the design of your popup is engaging and compelling enough, you will notice an increase in your conversion rate.

Using a popup builder like Popupsmart, you can achieve your business goals with conversion-ready popups.

Popupsmart's key features:

Easy Customization: Popupsmart offers an uncomplicated and straightforward system to let you customize your popups without needing a developer.

Fully Responsive Design: Popupsmart offers the best popup view in any dimension with responsive designs compatible with mobiles, tablets, and computers.

Privacy Policy & GDPR Ready: Popups designed concerning the new GDPR rules that fulfil all requirements.

Exit Intent Triggers: Detects users’ mouse behavior and shows them a targeted message as they leave.

Integration: By using Popupsmart, you will have unlimited possibilities with Zapier integration.

Actionable Insights: You can measure the performance of your popups with clear metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions.

Additionally, Popupsmart offers fresh, modern, stylish, and beautiful popup designs to make your conversion rates skyrocket with advanced targeting features at affordable prices!

Page Speed Measurement Tools

It is proven that websites with faster load times can benefit from higher conversion rates, lower bounce rates, higher SEO ranking scores, longer duration of visits on webpages, and better overall engagement.

This is why you need to achieve optimal speed on your webpage.

• Google Pagespeed Tool: It is a tool provided by Google that evaluates a website's performance and offers suggestions for enhancing its speed.
• WebPageTest: It enables companies to evaluate how well their website functions on a range of hardware and internet connections.
• ByteCheck: Businesses can use ByteCheck to evaluate how well their website performs across a range of internet connections and devices.

Landing Page Builders

Landing pages serving specific customer needs are more efficient than generic homepages. However, managing and optimizing multiple landing pages to obtain better performance in conversion rates can be very challenging. This is why you need to use a platform enabling you to maintain everything from a single dashboard.

• Google Sites: It is a free website builder that allows businesses to create websites and landing pages.
• Carrd: Businesses can develop landing pages that appear professional using this easy-to-use tool.
• Unbounce: A landing page builder is available through this landing page optimization platform.
• Wix: It is a user-friendly landing page and website builder platform that provides many solutions for various business types.
• Leadpages: Leadpages enables companies to produce attractive landing pages, along with integrations with many ESP platforms.
• Wishpond: Wishpond is a marketing automation software that enables companies to design and release landing pages.

Usability Test Tools

These tools help you to offer a better user experience and aid users in completing the desired action while increasing your website’s overall conversion rate.

• Usertesting: It enables companies to test their websites and other digital products to receive feedback on how well they are designed for users.
• Inspeclet: It offers solutions for tracking user activity and gathering information on user interactions, allowing businesses to learn more about the user experience of their websites.
• Five Second Test: It is a usability testing solution that enables businesses to collect input on the effectiveness of designs.

Bonus Tools

Popupsmart wants to ease your job on SEO, email marketing, and data measurement. Here are some free tools and what they can do to help you better digitally better is explained!

• SERP Preview Tool: It replicates the appearance of your webpage in search engine results for free.
• Cookie Consent Popup Creator: It creates free customizable cookie consent popups easily.
• Popup ROI Calculator: This calculator enables you to estimate the total profit of your investment in a popup service.
• Email ROI Calculator: It evaluates the effectiveness of digital efforts and investments in email campaigns.

Data Analysis in Conversion Rate Optimization

You need to know what to optimize, where optimization will be made, and for who to optimize to have high conversion rates.

There are two methods to analyze the data and improve your conversion rate practices:

Quantitative Data Analysis

To conduct the analysis, you need some numbers showing how people behave when they are on your website. Those numbers can be obtained from web analytics platforms tracking your conversions such as Google Analytics, and Next Analytics.

The information gives you insights on where you must put your efforts and resources. Moreover, it requires an objective approach.

Analytics-based CRO provides information like;

• Which webpage users visit firstly,
• Where they spend most of their time on your website,
• From where they found your website and clicked on a link,
• What type of devices and browsers are used by visitors,
• Who your potential customers are,
• After which activity, visitors leave your website.

Of course, the statics are not directly telling you all the information explained above. You are required to know some analytical language!

Qualitative Data Analysis

Qualitative data focuses on improvements to offer a better user experience with a subjective approach. The information can be obtained from on-site questionnaires, satisfaction surveys, and testimonial testing.

Because conducting a study on all users is not possible in terms of time and resources, ideal users should be chosen very carefully.

While selecting your focus group for research, you should pay attention to characteristics like;

• The purpose of the survey,
• How well you know the targeted individuals,
• Whether to offer an incentive,
• How often they make purchases,
• How regularly a user visits your website,
• How likely it is that a customer recommends your site to their connections.

After the data collection process, you will have information about users such as;

• Why they have engaged with your goals or not,
• Which one of your differentiated values made them stay longer,
• What made them have a better experience compared to your competitors,
• Which words have they used to define your products, services, and their grievances,

By combining this information with your quantitative data, you will gain a better understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, and an opportunity to engage the target audience with optimization.

Furthermore, a few surveys are not enough to demonstrate relevance and robust data; real gains would be achieved if and only if you have well-crafted and regularly reviewed data at hand.

Conversion Rate Optimization Metrics to Analyze

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors leaving after opening a single page. The lower the bounce rate, the better it is because this means people could not find what they were looking for on your website, so they left immediately.

The bounce rate of your website is calculated as follows;

Total Number of Webpage Visits / Total Number of Entries on Webpage

Here are some suggestions on how to lower the bounce rate of your website;

• Provide content having high readability and relevance,
• Don’t disrupt the user experience with unnecessary ads,
• Have attention-grabbing and creative calls-to-action buttons,
• Keep your webpages updated according to industry changes,
• Create mobile and user-friendly webpages,
• Make your webpages loading time skyrocket.

Exit Rate

Exit rate is the percentage of visitors leaving after scanning the page (the last page that users were on before moving on with their browsing activity). The lower the exit rate, the better it is because a low exit rate means the page is a favorable one from the webpages on your site.

The exit rate of your website is calculated a follows;

Total Exits from Webpage / Total Visits to Webpage

Here is some advice on how to decrease the exit rate of your website;

• Segment your customers according to their traffic-driving behaviors,
• Optimize your conversions primarily for your most liked webpages,
• Create exit surveys to figure out why a browser leaves without taking the desired action,
• Provide a differentiated value in your webpages,
• Trigger exit popups with different persuasive content,
• Always apply an A/B test to your webpages.

Engagement Metrics

Average Time on Site

The average time on site is the average duration people have viewed a single page. A high bounce rate means a low average time on site – users are not staying long enough to take the desired action for achieving the business goal.

Average Page Views

Average views on-site are the average amount of people viewing a single page. High average page views is a good sign as soon as conversions occur because it leads to customer engagement.

Value per Visitor

Value per visitor metric shows how much an average visitor costs your business, so you may know how much digital marketing budget you need in the next period.

The formula for value per visitor is provided below;

Total Number of Visitors / Total Revenue (during the same period)

To textualize the formula, think about it this way: if your webpage had 50.000 visitors during this month and you made $50.000 net profit, the value of one visitor is $1 on average.

Segmenting your visitors according to traffic source, pages, and demographics is also a good idea to determine the attributes you need to focus on.

Cost per Conversion

The cost per conversion metric provides information on which traffic channels are generating profit.

Suppose there are two traffic sources: one costs $10 per conversion, and the other costs $50 per conversion. Which would you choose to pay particular attention to?

You would go for the one with a higher traffic source and the lowest cost per conversion. In this case, you need to develop strategies to lower those numbers even more and dominate your competitors.

Time on Site (TOS)

Time on site metric refers to how long a visitor spends on one of your pages on average. Of course, it depends on the type of webpage. For instance, you would want your readers to spend more than 10 minutes on a well-written blog post page.

The average number obtained from this metric signals Google how well your website is. Therefore, the more time you convince people to spend on your webpages, the better it is.

To improve your average TOS, you may;

• Write compelling, relevant and attractive content for your webpages,
• Do A/B testing on your webpages to see whether or not regeneration is necessary,
• Add video content to improve the average browsing time.

Page Views

You need to know how many visitors have come to your site independent of your webpage type. This metric shows you how many people have visited your website and taken the desired action or left without converting.

For instance, if your monthly page views are around 10, and your conversion rate is 60%, it shows two things:

1. You can convert your visitors into customers.

2. You can not draw the browser’s attention to your website.

After completing your conversion rate optimization operations, to have excellent conversion rates, you need to enlarge your social networks, email list, and search engine optimization efforts to improve your page views.

Traffic Acquisition

This metric indicates how your visitors came to your website – through social media, direct clicks, organic search, email newsletter, etc. It enables you to put more effort and energy into specific digital marketing strategies.

For example, if your social media campaigns brought you 1% of your total traffic, you should know that making a strategy change is imperative.

Wrapping Up

Now, you have the knowledge to build and stick to a CRO plan correctly. There is always room for improvement, so continue following changes in the industry and make new decisions accordingly to stay in the game.

Don’t forget that to have sustainable growth; you should practice the ongoing process of CRO regardless of initial results.

Also, you need to continuously test your actions, and set goals depending on the metrics results. Never guess anything; the calculation and interpretation of analytics would provide you with the desired success.

I hope this guide answers all your questions about commencing conversion rate optimization for your website!

Conversion Rate Optimization FAQs

1. What is Conversion Rate Optimization in SEO?

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) in SEO is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action. For SEO, the desired action is improving a website’s ranking and the number of visitors coming organically from search engines. Then, take the desired action, such as filling out a form or purchasing.

2. What is Conversion Rate Optimization in Digital Marketing?

Conversion rate optimization in digital marketing is optimizing your sponsored ads, overall website design, and landing pages to increase the percentage of people who complete the desired action, such as adding a product to the cart.

3. What are Some Examples of Conversions?

A conversion is a general term for a website visitor completing the desired goal. Smaller conversions, called micro-conversions, can occur before a visitor completes a macro-conversion.

Examples of micro-conversions include;

• Signing up for an email list
• Adding a product to the cart
• Creating an account

Examples of macro-conversions include;

• Purchasing a product from the website
• Subscribing to service

4. How Do You Measure Conversion Rate?

To calculate a conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors, and multiply by 100.

Conversion rate formula: Conversion Rate = (conversions / visitors) x 100

5. How Do I Improve My Conversion Rate?

Use CRO tools to analyze your web pages and detect underperforming pages based on your conversion goals. Then, find out how you can improve their performance and what prevents visitors from taking the desired action — clicking a CTA or joining an email list.

Note: Analyze your highest-converting pages as well to see what works.

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Build Up Your Knowledge: CRO Experts

Growing your knowledge of CRO is strongly recommended for you. The process is simple: follow industry leaders producing excellent content.

Here is a list of CRO experts and their companies you ought to follow: